The present invention is generally related to online communities, and specifically to pairing members in the online community and providing directed advertisements to the members.
Physical appearance is perhaps the most important component used to evaluate users of dating services, such as may be provided by online social networks. However, current dating services only let users provide very basic preferences, such as body type, ethnicity, and hair color. Additionally, these features are not checked for accuracy. Thus, a user needs to search through many profiles to find someone who he/she actually finds attractive, which can be very time consuming.
Even if a person finds another user/member to be attractive, that person has no idea whether or not the other users would find that person attractive. Again, the person will waste a lot of time pursuing members that are not attracted to that person.
Additionally, physical appearance is also an important characteristic in the marketing of products. For example, clothing is shown with models on which people find the clothing flattering. However, different people can find different people attractive, and thus an advertisement that works well with one person will not particularly work well with another person.
It is therefore desirable to provide methods, systems, and apparatus for providing suitably attractive matches to a user of a online social network, as well as providing more persuasive and attractive advertisements to that person.